


picture perfect

by schlimmbesserung



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/M, Humanstuck, Romance
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-07-01
Updated: 2012-07-01
Packaged: 2017-11-08 23:34:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,189
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/448794
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/schlimmbesserung/pseuds/schlimmbesserung
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“A photograph is a secret about a secret, the more it tells you the less you know.”</p><p>In which Aradia juggles two snarky cool kids</p>
            </blockquote>





	picture perfect

**Author's Note:**

> so i have this overwhelming headcanon that humanstuck aradia is really into urbex photography.

-  
  
Click.  
  
Aradia straightens and gently grasps the fresh photograph as it’s ejected from her clunky Polaroid, quickly flipping it over so the sunlight won’t damage the picture. She hums a short tune while she waits for the photograph, then flips it back around to take a look at it. A wide smile crawls across her lips, because, yes, this is just _perfect_ ; exactly the angle she was aiming for and exactly the mood she was trying to capture. She opens up her CD holder and slips it under one of the plastic flaps (impromptu, but effective), then stuffs the case itself into her satchel for safe keeping.  
  
She sets off down the hallway, walking slowly so she can drink it all in; the musty tang in the air that collects on her tongue when she breathes in through her mouth, the way the sunlight filters through shattered glass and the shadows that settle deep in the corners it can’t quite touch. Her footsteps echo in soft thuds and she wonders a bit giddily just how long it’s been since anyone set foot in the halls of the decrepit school building. She tiptoes around the fragments of a smashed desk, pieces strewn across the floor, runs her fingers lightly over the cracked and peeling paint of a weathered mural. It’s severely achromatized, almost beyond recognition. The bright tropical fish are washed out into rusted pastels, bits and pieces scrawled over with blocky graffiti. She takes a few steps back to get a good shot in.  
  
 _Click._  
  
She loves the age of this place, the weight of it, the untold stories soaked in the cement. The rubble rolls and crunches beneath her sneakers, and the heavy wooden door whines in protest as she eases it open. Walking into the decaying classroom feels like walking into a memory. Forgotten by all the ones who conjured it, it hangs in the air as if waiting forlornly to be remembered. Some of the desks still have writing utensils cluttered on the surface, books open to pages with ink long faded white, like one day the school’s inhabitants had simply decided to stand up and leave and never come back.   
  
_I will remember you_ , she thinks. _I will not forget.  
_  
 _Click._  
  
She edges her way over to the room that conjoins the one she is in, separated by a gaping doorway. The door has either been ripped or rusted halfway off the hinges, and now hangs lopsidedly to the side. Just as she’s stepping through she catches a glimpse of a person in the other room,  and she instinctually lurches back with quick gasp. She was almost certain she wouldn’t find anyone in here. The building has been shut down for decades, and the tall brick walls surrounding the structure discourage vagrants and vagabonds and visitors of all kinds. Pressed against the wall, she listens for any hint of movement.  
  
When there is none, she determines that her precense has gone undetected. It would be best if she left now, because encounters with people in places like this are rarely pleasant. She has stumbled upon everything from drug addicts to depraved madmen to lecherous creeps to petty thieves. In fact, more often than not the people she comes across are a combination of all of those things. But... she _is_ curious. And what’s the point of having pepper spray if she never gets the chance to use it anyway? Carefully, she peeks around the corner.  
  
A young man is stretched out on a window sill, oxidized bars trapping him in and quelling any fear that he should fall out. His phone seems to be occupying all of his attention, and even from this distance Aradia can tell it’s one of those ultra high tech devices with internet and apps and other things she could never hope to afford. One lens of his sunglasses is electric blue, and the other bright scarlet. The walls around him are pockmarked and stained and covered in a collage of indecipherable graffiti, the floor littered with trash and debris. He looks very out of place in the middle of it all, with his sharp colors and his sleek look, but the contrast is something she can appreciate, artistically. The expression on his face ( _pensive, almost melancholy_ ) is sharp and defined and it strikes something in her. The room is bright, all of the windows facing the setting sun; she can probably get away with turning off her flash to sneak a picture. She’s reaching for her camera almost unconsciously, a force of habit.   
  
 _Click._  
  
“You know I can thee you, right?” he lisps out. Aradia flinches just a bit and her stomach swoops in surprise. He cranes his neck to look at her, “You aren’t exthactly being a fucking thuper thtealthy ninja or thomething. Are you taking pictureth of me?”  
  
A bit sheepishly, she creeps out from her hiding place, cupping her hand over the aforementioned picture to shield it from the destructive sunlight. “I was. You see, I’m a photographer. Well, somewhat. I guess I’m more of a _self_ - _proclaimed_ photographer, but the difference is indistinctive, really.”  
  
He quirks an eyebrow, which isn’t exactly a negative gesture, so she takes it as a good sign, “Ithn’t it, like, illegal to photograph people without their knowledge?”  
  
“Only if I make a profit off of it,” she shrugs, absently dragging a foot over the concrete floor. The loud scrapping sound almost makes her want to grind her teeth. “Which I won’t. Would you like to see it?”  
  
“Not really,” he replies in a tone that says _why is this conversation continuing to commence?_  
  
Aradia, however, holds the photo up to see herself. The lighting is actually very nice; better than she had anticipated it would be. “I wasn’t expecting to run into anyone here.”  
  
“Neither wath I,” he retorts edgily, refocusing on whatever it was he was doing on his phone. “Coming here to itholate mythelf from all the thittineth of thothiety _uthually_ workth.”  
  
“This area is sealed up pretty tight. Finding a place to go through the wall was hard enough, then I practically had to scour the whole campus to find a window low enough to climb through,” she says casually, leaning against the door frame as she tucks the picture into her CD holder. “How did you get in?”  
  
“Jethuth Chritht,” he shifts again, glaring at her. “You know, motht people would take that previouth thtatement ath a cue to leave me the fuck alone.”  
  
“Wow,” Aradia blinks, taken aback by his hostility. Indignant, she retorts, “I apologize for the intrusion. I’ll leave you to your own devices, then.”  
  
“No, wait, I didn’t mean to thound like that,” he says quickly, although she is already halfway out the door. “Look, I don’t even know you, I thouldn’t be acting like a giant dick jutht becauthe I’m in a bad mood. Thorry, I’m a total tool.”  
  
Hesitantly, she backpedals. Silence settles as she ponders over what to make of this situation. He _seems_ sincere enough. “We all have those days, I suppose. I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt.”  
  
“Thankth. That’th more than I would’ve given me,” he says, dropping down from the windowsill with a quiet _thump_. He leans against it rather than approaching her. Which is smart, because she still has her guard up enough that she probably would have pepper sprayed him (better safe than sorry). “Tho, uh, what’th your name?”  
  
“Aradia. And yours?”  
  
“Tholluxth.”  
  
She pauses briefly, “So, that’s... Sollux, then?”  
  
“That’th what I just thaid,” he confirms testily.  
  
Aradia tries very, very hard not to giggle. She almost succeeds. “You can’t pronounce your own name.”  
  
“Yeah, thankth for pointing that out,” he replies dryly. “That wath definitely a thing that I had never even realithed before.”  
  
-  
  
“The fuck is this douchebag?” Dave asks casually. Aradia looks up from his SLR camera and over at him. He’s stretched across his bed, languidly flipping through the photos she had taken that day.  
  
“I don’t recall giving you permission to snoop around my things,” she quips.  
  
“I show you mine, you show me yours,” he shoots back, lips twitching in the Strider equivalent of an impish grin. “Common courtesy, Medigo. You should read up on proper etiquette.”  
  
“Why bother with textbooks when you’re right here and so obviously prepared to school me?” she says, playing to his ego as she goes back to fiddling with the camera, experimentally twisting the outer support ring on the lens.  
  
“I work on a one lesson per day basis,” he replies, voice easily slipping into a practiced rhythm. “I have a tight schedule as is, can’t be wasting all my time laying mad education on the less informed. I have countless other worldly duties to tend to. I know I’m great and all, but it’s just not cool trying to monopolize all my time like that. Please, try to find some self-restraint.”  
  
She reaches over and tears away a strip of paper from one of the many notebooks tossed haphazardly on Dave’s desk, folding it and carefully sliding it in between the jammed camera shutters. “You’ve seen right through me. I’m just-- what was it you called it? Macking on you so hard?”  
  
“Wow. Do everyone a favor and never put those words in your mouth again,” he says, rolling over onto his back to stare at the ceiling.  
  
“Am I not hip enough for your Strider Slang?” she teases.  
  
“Stop, just stop,” he deadpans. “But, no, who’s the random guy sporting the old school 3D shades?”  
  
“Just someone I stumbled across,” she shrugs, lifting the camera and aiming it at him. His normally smooth and precisely styled hair is in disarray, wisps of soft blond swaying erratically in the breeze of his large, industrial fan. Thin locks stick to his forehead with sweat. _Click_.  
  
“ _Really?_ I definitely hadn’t already gathered that from this limited evidence,” he snarks back.  
  
She gets up, stumbling a bit over the mess of computer and turn table wires, and shoves him as she crawls onto the bed, dropping the camera on his chest and plucking the picture from his hands. “He reminded me a little of you.”  
  
His lips pull down, just the tiniest bit. “I don’t see it.”  
  
“Just a little. He talked sort of similarly,” she insists. “Don’t get so offended. It’s just an observation.”  
  
“Who’s offended?” he sniffs.  
  
The camera is between her face and his when she turns to fully look at him. She pushes it away impatiently, “You are, because you’re ridiculous.”  
  
He looks scandalized by the blatant show of aggression towards his camera. “I’m so far from ridiculous it needs a telescope to see me. Sent out some observational probes, but it’ll be decades before they even reach my orbit.”  
  
“It’s a good picture, though, isn’t it?” she opts for a subject change, rather than getting tangled in the many convoluted layers of Dave Strider.  
  
“I thought portraiture wasn’t your thing,” his head tilts just enough to take another look at the photo. When she’s this close, she can almost see his eyes through the dark tint of his sunglasses.  
  
“I made an exception. It’s a good picture, isn’t it?” she presses with a knowing smile, playfully hooking her foot around his.  
  
“It’s not terrible,” he shrugs passively, lightly nudging her with his knee in response.  
  
She realizes that’s about as close to a positive response as she will get out of him. She tucks the picture away, dropping the case on the cluttered night stand. “You could have easily fixed the camera yourself. It was only dirt in the shutter.”  
  
“It was a good excuse for you to come over, though. Like, fuck, I am so considerate. Saving you from another tortuous day without me. Bam, there’s my good deed for the week,” his sentence slips into a yawn and he tops it off with a long, lazy stretch.  
  
A smile creeps across her lips involuntarily, and she takes a second to wonder over Dave’s ability to fend them off so easily. “Oh, how _lucky_ I am to have a friend like you.”  
  
-  
  
 _Click._  
  
Aradia is poking around the school grounds again a few days later, snapping shots of a massive, uprooted oak tree. The leaves have long withered away and the naked, gnarled branches reach skyward like hundreds of desperate hands. Dave would like it, she thinks.  
  
“Hey.”  
  
She twirls around in the midst of humming her developing tune, skirt swishing about her knees. Sollux stands a few feet off, slouching, hands tugging at his pockets and a frown tugging at his lips. She smiles broadly, “Hey! I was just beginning to think I wouldn’t meet you again.”  
  
His eyebrows rise in surprise-- or question, she can’t quite tell which.  
  
“Would you like to see it?” she offers, holding the fresh photograph out to him.  
  
“I’m good,” he shuffles on his feet, looking off to the side and then back. She’s almost surprised he had greeted her. In the short half hour they had talked before, he certainly hadn’t grown any friendlier. In fact, by the time he left he had seemed even more irritated!  
  
“I’ve thought about it for a bit, and I decided I wanted to ask you something if I ran into you again,” she continues undeterred, putting the picture away.  
  
“Really?”  Again, that expression tottering between surprise and unspoken inquiry.  
  
“Really,” she says, rocking back lightly on her heels. Silence stretches (she's teasing him, of course).  
  
“Well, what ith it?” he prompts, words sharpened by annoyance.  
  
“Would you be interested in posing for some photos for me? Or is it too soon for me to request that without sounding strange?” her question trails away into a laugh.  
  
“That ith a pretty weird thing to athk thomeone you just met,” he concedes, digging his hands further into his pockets. “And I don’t thee why you’d want to take pictureth of thomeone like me, anyway.”  
  
It’s difficult to explain properly. His mismatched converse and skinny jeans, the headphones looped around his neck, his flashy glasses; it all stands out so starkly in a place like this, and yet something about him-- something about the way he stands, the somber pull at his lips-- it fits so perfectly. She settles with simply saying, “You have a nice look about you.”  
  
In hindsight, she realizes this could all very easily be misinterpreted. Warmth creeps into her cheeks. She hastily changes the subject, “I’ll give you a while to think about it then. In the meantime, do you happen to know any way inside that doesn’t involve crawling through a broken window?”  
  
“If you don’t mind going in through the bathement,” he replies nonchalantly.  
  
If she needs it, she still has her pepper spray.  “Sounds wonderful.”  
  
The entrance is hidden in a small, enclosed courtyard carefully concealed on the eastern side of the grounds, and seeing it now it’s no surprise Aradia had so easily overlooked it. The area itself is heavily overgrown, the grass tall enough to tickle her knees, and the door Sollux reveals is completely consumed by the ivy that crawls up the brick walls. She can’t even begin to guess how he had discovered it in the first place. The bottom of the door drags through the dirt as he opens it and inside all Aradia can see is a concrete staircase that fades into total blackness.  
  
“It’s dark,” she notes.  
  
“Don’t tell me you’re thcared,” he says with a smirk that’s a little too smug for her liking.  
  
“No,” she starts walking down the steps to prove her point. “But how are we supposed to navigate in total darkness?”  
  
“I know the way,” he says from behind her, and suddenly the space before her is lit with a bright, blue light. She looks back quizzically and is momentarily blinded. “Oh, and my phone hath a flathlight app, becauthe we kind of live in the twenty-firtht thentury. There’th that, too.”  
  
She rolls her eyes as hard as she can when they’re squinted against the sharp glow, “Right, of course.”  
  
They descend into basement, cool and dank and cluttered with any number of broken pipes, water heaters, and other crumbling, blackened appliances. Cobwebs hang heavy over every available surface, like cotton bedsheets thrown over furniture in a foreclosed house. The hollow sound of vacant air whispers through the room. Aradia absently fiddles with her camera, eyes darting about appraisingly.  
  
“Thith way,” Sollux directs mildly, tip-toeing carefully through the rubble.  
  
“Hold on, not so fast,” she complains. “I want to take pictures.”  
  
His mouth sets deeper in a frown and he crosses his arms impatiently, “Do I look like your perthonal tour guide? I’m not going to thtand around all day and wait for you to take pictureth of a bunch of fucking rotting metal.”  
  
“Then leave,” she replies indifferently, walking off in the opposite direction. Although, without the light from his phone it’s so dark she can hardly see her own hands in front of her face. She opens her satchel and digs around, hoping she brought her little keychain flashlight. She should know by now to bring it with her, even though most of the building is naturally well lit. It’s really an amateur mistake to be without one.  
  
“Where are you going?” Sollux demands irritably. She ignores him. “Hey, theriouthly, don’t go that way. I don’t know what’th back there.” There’s a loud clattering raucous as he scrambles back over the debris he had just crossed. “There could be wild animalth or _faulty wiring_ or any kind of thit. Are you lithtening to what I’m thaying to you? Are you fucking thtupid or thomething?”  
  
“Do _not_ call me stupid,” she retorts, rounding on him with a glare that could wilt flowers. “I’ve been to enough of these kinds of places. I know what to look out for. I am perfectly capable of taking care of myself.”  
  
“But how are you thuppothed to look out for thomething when you can’t even _thee_?” he growls, and she must admit he has a point. Except she will not admit that, ever. Over her dead body. He pauses, inhaling and exhaling slowly. “Okay. Okay, tho I wath kind of out of line there. Or a lot out of line. It wath like line wath popthicleth on a hot thummer day and I wath the ithe cream man and all the kidth were running up with their groth, thticky money but i wath out of that thit. I apologithe. Are we thtill cool?”  
  
Aradia shifts unsurely, but she honestly can’t help but to be amused by his elaborate and ridiculous metaphor. She does seem to have a soft spot for extensive, overcompensating and often obscure forms of conversation. “It’s okay, I guess. How about we make a compromise then?”  
  
“That thoundth pretty cool,” he concedes. “Thuggethtions?”  
  
“I get to take two,” she holds up her fingers for emphasis. “pictures. Only two. Then we move on. Sound good?”  
  
“How many would you take otherwithe?”  
  
She hums in thought, “Anywhere between five and ten, probably.”  
  
“Two thoundth really good.”   
  
-


End file.
